Wrong, the intelligence services said the only way he would become a threat to the US would be if the US invaded and thus gave him an incentive to pull out the stops and use any WMD he may have had. They rated his threat as otherwise negligible, due to the obvious likelihood of American invasion and him losing power if he so much as farted outside his own borders. The only real reasons to invade were humanitarian intervention, and the neocon project of establishing a "democratic" foothold in the arab Middle East.
Newsweek published a poll showing that 50% thought Clarke was basically a lying scumbag and something like 65% said his claims did not affect how they felt about Bush. I may have the details of that slightly wrong, as I heard it on the radio, but I think that is basically accurate. I think this substantiates my original point that this focus on terrorism and 9/11 works to Bush's favor, even if he is subjected to damaging criticism. Kerry is totally lacking in credibility in this area. If the election is decided on who the voters want leading the war on terror, Kerry is in deep trouble. He has to change the subject to the economy somehow, but they can't leave this stuff alone. The problem is this is the issue the activists are up in arms about. Kerry released his grand plan to improve the economy last week, and no one paid any attention. The Clarke stuff totally overshadowed it. Actually, considering how weak the plan was, that may have been a good thing for Kerry, but his message is gettting drowned out by Clarke and the 9/11 Commisssion.
My whole problem with the way that the invasion of Iraq was handled ( and I have always maintained this ) is that our Central Intelligence Agency was totally "prostituted". This Administration has totally compromised the "truth-telling" abilities of the CIA, and the ability to come in with data without fear of reprisal or career displacement. Under the best days under Colby, or John McCone, the agency had very clear instructions set down by the Director: You must seek the truth and be independent in doing so. - - - Even if it meant for a junior intelligence analyst going up against Henry Kissinger. And even George Bush, Sr. much to his credit, acted and maintained the same philosophy. He was very careful to keep himself out of policy advocacy, and he told it like it was. But with the current administration, it is so embarrassing to see George Tenet, a good man and with terrific credentials, give up and shade the intelligence and cave in when his analysts had been slogging through much for the better part of a year and a half trying to tell it like it is . . . It is tremendously demoralizing to the agency, and very infuriating. For example, there were rather courageous CIA analyts under terrific pressure from the likes of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to establish a contact or connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. They resisted this ever since 9/11, not out of any unwillingnesss to believe it, but simply because there was no evidence to establish it. To their credit, they held the line, and were supported by Brent Scowcroft of all people, who very courageously spoke out and said that evidence is "scant". I think that there is no doubt that the Bush Administration, Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were obsessed with Iraq. Are we suppose to just ignore the quotes of President Bush in Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War or the comments by General Wesley Clark who appeared on a Sunday talk show with Tim Russert on June 15th in which Clark surprisingly mentioned that he was called at his home by the White House on September 11th and told to make the connection between those terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein or the comments made byGeneral Henry H. Shelton who became the 14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October of 1997? And yet all we see her on ET is a bunch of partisan rhetoric and screaming and yelling about Richard Clarke's testimony and bookdeal and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. If some of you guys can't see how the CIA has been totally "gutted" due to Bush's invasion of Iraq, you really are quite naive. This has tremendous repercussions for many many years down the road, and quite frankly, it scares me that the CIA has now become a "lapdog" of the Administration. What a shame!